For states to receive some of the funding stipulated in the Trump administration’s “big, beautiful” bill, they must meet three of ten criteria, including incorporating more artificial intelligence (AI) technology in health care parameters – which experts say could have major advantages and disadvantages for underfunded hospitals, depending on how it is implemented.
The Rural Health Transformation Fund is a carve-out that will provide $50 billion to states over a five-year period. who meet certain application criteriaincluding “consumer technology solutions for the prevention and management of chronic diseases” and “providing training and technical assistance for the development and adoption of technology solutions that improve the delivery of care in rural hospitals, including remote monitoring, robotics, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies.”
Analysts noted that this $50 billion it won’t be enough to compensate for the Congressional Budget Office forecasts $911 billion Reducing Medicaid spending over the next decade under the bill (Obba). These cuts will affect both patients who lose free health coverage under Medicaid and hospitals that benefit from those patients’ Medicaid reimbursements.
Chenhao Tan, associate professor of data science at the University of Chicago, and Karni Chagal-Feferkorn, assistant professor in the College of AI and Cybersecurity at the University of South Florida, said AI technology could bring major benefits to rural hospitals that often lack resources and staff. They also agreed that AI could potentially ease the administrative burden that doctors in these hospitals often face.
Doctors are responsible for taking detailed notes about patient visits and compiling them for electronic medical records systems – a task that can take eight hours or more each week, depending on the American Medical Association.
A recent study found that AI-generated patient notes are of similar quality to those of GPs, but worse than those of expert doctors. Tan said it is important to consider context – as frequent burnout of doctors in rural hospitals – to be taken into account when assessing risks and benefits.
“If we take tired human doctors as a starting point, then I think it’s even easier to make the case that AI can do better than them,” Tan said.
Chagal-Feferkorn hopes AI can help alleviate staffing issues in rural hospitals, not only by reducing workload but by attracting more doctors.
“If the equipment is state-of-the-art and they feel that a lot of the tedious work is done by AI, I think that could incentivize doctors to go to work in rural areas, that could have a big impact,” she said.
The FDA currently regulates AI technologies intended to assess and diagnose health conditions because they are considered medical devices. However, technologies that simply transcribe and compile patient notes are not regulated, even though they may present themselves as being Hipaa compliant.
While Tan said it would be too lofty to expect these technologies to be “bulletproof” before they can enter the market, he acknowledged that “there should be something higher than nothing” in terms of regulatory requirements.
Chagal-Feferkorn also said that the proliferation of AI also creates additional cybersecurity challenges.
“AI makes it easier for ordinary people to hack systems,” she said, adding that AI has the potential to improve patient safety by merging patient records from different providers so that, for example, each provider is aware of every medication a patient is taking and can thus easily avoid dangerous drug interactions.
But this type of technology will also require more privacy precautions.
“The more data sharing there is, obviously the greater the risk of data security breaches,” Chagal-Feferkorn continued.
To mitigate these risks, Tan said “workforce evolution must go hand in hand” with the adoption of AI technology. But Tan and Chagal-Feferkorn both expressed concern that underfunded hospitals would attempt to adopt AI technology as a cost-cutting measure without the necessary staffing and security infrastructure.